Irish exilic cinema in England

Abstract

Irish exilic cinema is defined by the nexus of entanglements between Ireland and England as a subset of wider Irish–British relations. A case study of a Belfast-born director Hans – later known as Brian Desmond Hurst (1895–1986) – is offered as axiomatic of the Irish exilic manifest in cinema. Using the idea of the ‘slipzone of anxiety and imperfection’ (Hamid Naficy, ‘Situating Accented Cinema’, in Transnational Cinema (London: Routledge, 2006), 111.) to characterise the London hub of the cinema business mid-century as an uneasy socio-cultural space, it explores Hurst's career arc within this phase of Britain's imperial history, including Ireland's (re)positioning. Applying a queered concept of the auteur, Hurst's exilic Irishness and sexuality are considered as ‘performed within material and semiotic circumstances’ pertaining to a specific historical juncture (Richard Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, in The Culture of Queers (London: Routledge, 2002), 35). Analysis of films from Dangerous Moonlight (1941) to Dangerous Exile (1957) shows that Hurst's most telling cinematic insights come not in films set in or about Ireland but rather in narratives of outsiders/exiles in British war and colonial films that expose socio-cultural anxieties about Englishness, class and decolonisation.

Keywords:

• exilic
• British cinema
• Hurst
• auteur
• queer cinema
• Irishness

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the RAE-funded leave in 2009 at Leeds Metropolitan University which enabled the research to be completed. He also wishes to thank Daniel Payne at OCAD, Toronto, the BFI, London and Ruth Barton at Trinity College, Dublin, for the invitation to give the lecture at ‘Screening the Irish in Britain’ on which this paper is substantially based. All quotations from Travelling the Road © Hurst Estate, 2009.

Notes

 1. Shaw, ‘Ireland Eternal and External’, 295. This essay was originally published on 30 October 1948.

 2. Louis MacNeice in a letter to Eric Dodds, quoted in Harte, Literature of the Irish in Britain, 180 (original emphasis).

 3. Susan Hayward's ‘National Cinema’ series commissioned Sarah Street and Ruth Barton to provide the British and Irish titles respectively. See also Gunning, ‘Waking and Faking’, which explores an alternative history and conception of Irish cinema (19–31).

 4. Gough-Yates, ‘Exiles and British Cinema’, 104–13.

 5. See Slide, The Cinema and Ireland; Negra, The Irish in US; Barton, Screening Irish-America.

 6. Pettitt, ‘Donnellan, Ireland and Dissident Documentary’; Barton, Irish National Cinema, 3–12.

 7. Boorman, Adventures of a Suburban Boy.

 8. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland, 6–46.

 9. See census data for 1901 and 1911, the latter online. In a major public demonstration at Belfast's City Hall and elsewhere in the province, the Covenant was conceived to provide a religio-political rallying point for Irish unionism, to protest against nationalist ‘Home Rule’ legislation being considered by Asquith's government in London and protect their ‘heritage of British citizenship’. Online documentation allows us to see Hans Hurst's signature by searching for ‘Ulster Covenant’: www.proni.gov.uk

10. Dusinberre, ‘Avant-garde’, 48–9; see also from the mid-1930s Hurst's own ‘World's Only New Art Form’, 4.

11. Hurst, Travelling the Road, 110; Costner, ‘Hurst to Direct Lawrence Film’, n. pag. Miles Malleson produced a script co-written with Hurst. This is reproduced in Kelly, Richards, and Pepper, Filming T.E. Lawrence, with an informative editorial introduction (1–21).

12. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, 281–305.

13. Hurst, ‘The Future of Telecinema’, 7. In the absence of any recording of his voice, Hurst's spoken accent is difficult to place socially or geographically – though acquaintances have indicated to me that he sounded ‘well-spoken’, ‘educated’ Irish and, in some memoir accounts, that it was quite high-pitched in tone.

14. Naficy, ‘Situating Accented Cinema’, 111.

15. These cover the late 1930s, the 1940s and 1950s and later assessments in the early 1970s. See Page, ‘Mixed Bag’; Noble, British Film Year Book, 21; Balcon et al., Twenty Years of British Film; Ackland and Grant, Celluloid Mistress; Durgnat, A Mirror for England; Greene, The Pleasure Dome.

16. Quoted in McIlroy, ‘British Filmmaking’, 26.

17. Caughie with Rockett, Companion to British and Irish Cinema, 87.

18. http://www.tcd.ie/irishfilm/ (accessed 28 July 2010).

19. Barton, Irish National Cinema, 56.

20. Interestingly, Richards in Films and British National Identity also focuses on Hurst's ‘Irish’ films – with the exception of Scrooge – making the case that BDH was ‘British cinema's equivalent of Ford as a director returning regularly to Irish themes’ (244) and then notes the irony of 20th Century Fox contracting Ford to make a trilogy of films about the British Empire in India (246).

21. McIlroy, ‘An Appreciation’; Slide, The Cinema and Ireland.

22. McIlroy, ‘British Filmmaking’, 25–39.

23. McIlroy, ‘British Filmmaking’, 26. See also McIlroy, ‘Exodus, Arrival and Return’.

24. Chapman, The British at War, 197–8. See also Richards and Sheridan, Mass Observation at the Movies, which has some fascinating insights into the appeal – visual, star performance and music – for popular audiences across the country.

25. Barton, Irish National Cinema, 54.

26. Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, 35.

27. Bourne, Brief Encounters, 54–5 and ‘Behind the Masks’; Barton, Irish National Cinema, 51–6.

28. Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, 35.

29. Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, 34.

30. Dyer, ‘Believing in Fairies’, 36.

31. Hurst, Travelling the Road, 111–18. See also Birkbeck's ‘Queer Fifties’ conference, May 2009, especially Elizabeth Wilson's notion of ‘war damage’.

32. The quotation about the poor-quality script is from an unnamed reviewer for the Sunday Times (n.d.) and the second is taken from the pre-release publicity booklet for the film, both on microfiche for Dangerous Moonlight, BFI microfiche collection, n.d.

33. Young, Dangerous Moonlight, 60. ‘Shot 331: CU Insert. On portion of letter [FROM CAROL]: “At least send me his address. I don't know how to reach him you see”’.

34. Bombardier, later humorist and jazz musician, Spike Milligan, begged to differ. In his memoir he recalls seeing the film in Neasden, remembering ‘the bloody awful Warsaw Concerto’ (Adolf Hitler, 57).

35. Off-screen the piano was played by Louis Kentner. Hurst, Travelling the Road, 119–20. View the sequence at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = P4cu1vtIVxo (accessed 6 November 2009).

36. Barton, ‘Potency of Cheap Music’, 205–6.

37. Hurst, Travelling the Road, 118.

38. Chapman, British at War, 198.

39. Geraghty, British Cinema in the 1950s.

40. Geraghty, British Cinema in the 1950s, 125.

41. Hurst, Travelling the Road, 155.

42. For a brief accounts of the film's production see Forbes, Notes for a Life, 253–4; MacQuitty, A Life to Remember, 318–21.

43. Hourani, History of the Arab Peoples, 353–69.

44. See, for example, Basil Dearden's, Pool of London (1951) and Sapphire (1959) for much more progressive exploration of interracial relationships and racism in British film. In Robin Maugham's original story, it is Sheik Salem not his mixed-race grandson who destroys the paper-legal lineage in a fire causing Charles to exclaim: ‘You've destroyed his chance of freedom’ (Maugham, The Black Tent, 50).

45. There is in a private collection an extant but undated shooting script adaptation of James Stephens' novel The Crock of Gold (1912) from the 1960s which indicates this. Additionally, the Killanin Papers of the Irish Film Archive, Dublin, corroborate Hurst's memoir that he had developed a film called Jackboot in Ireland, based on the autobiography of the notorious Nazi commando/war criminal Otto Skortzeny who was living in exile between south Co. Dublin and Madrid in the 1960s. Dudley Sutton cast some light on the aborted attempt to put Liam Flaherty's novel Famine on screen in the late 1960s and early 1970s but the location-hunting trip to the west of Ireland that he recalls seems to have been BDH's excuse for drinking with friends. Interview with author, London, October 2008.

46. De'ath, ‘Exiles in London’, 576.